JAMs News

[p]Hey! ːcta_emo7ː[/p][p]It's that time of year again, time to vote! Please cast your vote for us to be the 'Labor of Love' award winner! I know we are going up against the entire Steam Store and we don't really stand a chance, but I have to at least ask![/p][p]Last year when we were eligible in all categories, we were just a week or so into the beginning of the project and nothing had even really been started. It didn't even make sense to vote for but at this point in the game with 600+ versions in, I think we are getting a bit closer to the goals, but not quite all the way there yet. The game's UI works now, over 400 designs, built an inventory, leaderboard, statistics history and a collection screen, a mini-game and even the music player to embed music tracks into some items. We've come a long way from the era where the buttons in the UI did not line up for months.[/p][p]I'm definitely going to keep piling on the content into the app so it just gets more and more feature-rich as we go on. At first, I was having so much fun making songs and posting videos, but the app was a broken mess, so I stopped doing that not long after we started so I could focus on making the app good (and keeping up with the daily items). Now with the recent advances in image generation, it saves me a ton of time when getting the items ready now. At first it used to take me all day to make something that was hard to comprehend and now it can basically instantly create exactly what I can imagine, to the point where I was able to gain enough progress to knock off a lot of those features I mentioned.[/p][p]What I regret was not making more songs. I feel like it is more important to create a few new minigames and make the app more complete, but we sort of missed a bit of an opportunity in AI music generation. With Universal Music suing Udio and shutting them down to create a new platform, and Warner Music doing the same thing to Suno yesterday, it may be basically impossible to create AI music as we once knew it. There will be new products coming in the future, so we'll see what comes down the pipeline but I wish I had a bigger of a catalog at this moment (of actual good tracks). [/p][p]Udio/UMG are creating a new type of product we have not yet seen, it says specifically in the announcement post that they are going to be building a new platform which is going to be trained and licensed on UMG's vast existing catalog of releases. So even though they destroyed all the masters to your favorite music in the Universal Studios fire of 2008, they are going to use AI to make new music from their estates. Great. And now with Warner Music and Suno partnering up, we can assume they are going to do the same thing over there. If you thought AI music was weird or tacky now, it's probably going to get a lot weirder and a lot tackier.[/p][p]So yea I wish we had a bit deeper of a music catalog but maybe it will be like the advances in image generation where it becomes far easier and better, technology is moving forward very quickly. We'll see what the future holds! Let me know if you have any feature suggestions for the game and please cast your vote for us in the Steam Awards for the 'Labor of Love' award! I'll try to whip up another Vote 4 JAMs song like last year. ːbgt_coolː[/p][p]https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards/nominations/2025 [/p][p][/p]

[p]Updated Unity! v1.607 is the first version with the recent vulnerability patched Unity Editor. [/p]

[p]Hey!

This week I have been working on a media player for the JAMs songs, and I think I've got it pretty much complete at this point, or usable at least. I made a bunch of AI music like a year ago, and I stopped working on that since the game itself was so far from complete at the time. Now that the game is starting to get more complete, the next logical step was to add the music in. The prophecy is complete --- JAMs now actually has JAMs in it!!! [/p][p][/p][p]When you don't want it open, you can just minimize it using the 'X' on the end there:[/p][p][/p][p]Click on this 'Song List' button to view your songs:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]And your playlist screen might look something like this. The songs are locked behind items, so you may have a ridiculous sounding playlist if you only have 1 item with a song in it, but I only added like 27 songs in there so far. I haven't made any music for awhile so I have to get back into that zone one of these days! At least the system will exist from a technical perspective with a few songs and I can add them in over time. I could also include some of those tracks from the royalty-free BGM music packs from bundles if they have any good songs, I have quite a few of those to go through.[/p][p]I was trying to think of how to categorize the items from an inventory tagging perspective, for now what I have done is put a music note and the track name in the item description (that's how I made the system detect them). I might need to come up with a bit more granular of a tag for the genre of the music, I am just thinking eventually if you have thousands of songs and they are a total random mix of rap, country, & electronic, a button to change the genre could work like a radio station. [/p][p]At the moment, the system gives you 2 playlists: Game and Menu. You can have a different set of songs enabled for when you are on the menu or playing a game. That should work for a version 1 for now, you can at least disable songs. [/p][p][/p][p]Oh and if you click this button in the settings menu, you can change the media player's position (pinned to top or bottom of the window). To change the volume, use the volume control in the settings menu for music.[/p]

[p]Okay I spent a few days wrestling with Unity but I finally got it done --- the first minigame JAMTRIS is complete! You can access it via this icon on the main screen for now:[/p][p][/p][p]So in the minigame when you score points, it immediately counts towards your click counter on the main screen, so technically you could just play this game INSTEAD of active clicking, and the auto-clicker (if equipped) will still be clicking away in the background. The points/steamstat are awarded per-line-clear (not at the game-over screen, when the high score is submitted). to just give you another way to advance towards those achievements. I didn't add an achievement yet for JAMTRIS, if I do I'll make it very reasonable to hit, like maybe a score of 10K... I can't make the minigames each really hard to complete if I add lots of them, so don't worry about a huge score requirement from this. The points double for each level you advance to (each 10 lines cleared advances the level).[/p][p][/p][p]I have also started working on the leaderboards. You will see Unique Items Owned, Clicks, Time Played JAMTRIS score all starting to accumulate on the Steam Community tab now. I will get the leaderboard displays inside of the game ready in the next day or two![/p][p]Also the gamepad controls for JAMTRIS are ready to go, if you have a controller it works great![/p][p]Now future minigames will be a lot easier to program in too, it took some time trying to get game-world objects into a 2D UI, but now that little background panel itself is a RenderTexture that displays a game, we can technically put any kind of 3D games to be played inside the existing JAMs UI. [/p][p]A lot of restructuring took place so I hopefully have fixed most of everything that broke in the process. I can already see a bug with tooltips showing up too wide for the game UI now... and background color doesn't update until you flip the scene --- expect a few tiny bugs like that right now, I'm super glad it's at least 99% back together again anyway![/p][p]
[/p]

[p]Hey I added a new collection screen to the app, it's located to the far left![/p][p]You can click on the items you own and you will be taken to the item details screen for that item. It also shows the quantity of that item in the list! [/p][p]You can change the sort order to be ID# and by name, and I made it display that text in your chosen language. [/p][p]The 'back' button on the item details screen will go to the inventory if you click in from there, but if you click in from the collection screen, the back button will go back to collection (and the hover tooltip displaying correctly). [/p][p]I might tweak the visual design of this screen a bit more (the green on owned items is a bit jarring) but for now it seems to work pretty good! You can use this to quickly navigate to a certain item without using the inventory screen at all.[/p][p]There may be a few extra at the bottom that are unreleased / WIP items, ignore those for now. I'll have to optimize my search filter without having to build-in a set item # into the game to end at. If I leave the descriptions as 'TBD' it will ignore those so I can just leave the descriptions as that until they are almost ready to launch.[/p][p]I also made it so the items in the collection screen not yet owned are clickable and go to the corresponding Steam Market page instead of the item details screen, and on the item details screen there is now an icon to go to the Steam Market page for that item. The ones that are unmarketable don't have these links. [/p][p][/p]